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Well, thank you all for joining today. I will be making forward-looking statements, so I caution everyone to read our disclaimer. It’s fully posted on our website. A quick snapshot from our capital structure. Currently sitting at a $2.2 billion market cap company. Cash balance currently, after today’s poor, is sitting around $145 million. Our revolving credit facility is undrawn. After the first quarter of ownership, we paid $75 million down on that out of our cash flow, so we have a fully undrawn RCF. Long-term debt facility that amortizes over three years, we’re chipping away at it, sitting around 142. So net debt position of nil after, call it, eight months of ownership, which I think is a testament to our management team.
Institutionally, we are 75 institutionally held, 5% management, 5% Wheaton Precious Metals, Orion Mine Finance, and the rest retail. Tremendous street coverage, ranges target prices from $9 to $12 over the next 24 months.
To take a step back, Hemlo is one of the most prolific Canadian assets in mining history. It’s located about 30 kilometers east of the town of Marathon. It’s produced over 25 million ounces since it went into production over 40 years ago. The first 17 million ounces were taken out at an average gold price of $350 an ounce, the remaining about $1,100 an ounce. At its peak production, Hemlo represented 25% of Canada’s gold production and around 2.1% of Canada’s GDP. So the prolific nature is one of the main reasons why we kept the name Hemlo.
Current resource and reserves are sitting around 5.7 million ounces, both underground and open pit. Our current operating capacity is around 3,800 ton per day. I think that’s one of the things that we realized right away during the due diligence process when Barrick was divesting this last year, is the latent infrastructure that is currently in place. Currently operating about 40% of our capacity. Our hoisting capacity is around 6,000 ton per day. Nameplate capacity on the mill is 10,000 ton per day, and our permitted capacity for the mill is 13,500. In the first half of the year, we produced just over 60,000 ounces for an attributable AISC of 2,157.
Just looking at the tech report that Barrick commissioned and we filed last year, it highlighted a 14-year mine life average annual production of around 138,000 ounces. Life of mine production just over 2 million ounces. Obviously that puts a peg in the evaluation. If we thought that that’s all this could do, we would not be here today. We wouldn’t be able to raise $1.1 billion to acquire this, which was the largest financing ever done by a shell and the largest equity financing ever done on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Our growth plan is quite simple. It’s fully funded, beautiful organic growth pipeline, and is really centered around two key pillars. Our biggest strategic asset is our mill, okay? As I highlighted right now earlier, we’re operating around 40% capacity. Our growth plans are significant. Our first phase is from 38 to 48. That’s increasing our Alamac production, bringing in another Alamac crew, which were well on their way. Second phase of growth is from 48 to 6,000 ton per day, which would get you around 200,000 ounces of attributable production. That’s opening up new mining fronts that I’ll highlight later on in the presentation. And then the last phase from six to ten is contemplating doing the pushback on our open pit and a bulk tonnage scenario from underground, which would get you well north of 250,000 ounces, putting us in the top ten Canadian gold mines, the second-largest single asset, other than Artemis.
The next pillar, which is really the foundation of this growth, is our resource and reserve growth. Within six months of ownership, we increased the M&I resource by 34%. We have kicked off one of the largest drill programs globally of 130,000 meters. That work will underpin our updated technical report in the second half of 2027. There are multiple regional targets that we’re going to look at later on in the presentation as well.
Just highlighting the long section here. Hemlo is very unique given its geological nature. This is a Precambrian or an Archean porphyry deposit. The beauty about that is it allows a lot of mine flexibility and mining fronts so that we can crank the tonnage that we’ve highlighted here. So we run nine mining zones with multiple mining fronts in each zone. We sector off the mine so that each crew is responsible for production, development, services, and pace, which allows us to focus on these discrete sections, so we’re not tramming across the mine. We have a hoisting capacity of, like I said, 6,000 ton per day. All of our growth is above the deepest portion of the mine, and we have significant crushing capacity both underground and on surface.
There’s a few key bottlenecking exercises that are underway, and I’ll touch on them briefly. One of them is around the mining sequencing or the mining method. Back in the day, they did go bottom up. Currently, we are top down. We are switching that sequence back to bottom up. Why that’s significant is right now, in the previous management, they were skipping about 70% of their waste to surface. By switching the sequencing and breaking to the next level, we can drop a lot of that waste back down the hole and minimize the skipping of waste, which will lower our cost profile.
Number two is maximizing the portal haulage. We were fortunate that Barrick broke through and put in a 4,000-ton a day ramp at the top of the mine. So we can be pulling about 10,000 ton per day out of this mine. There’s additional mining areas throughout the mine that are amenable to bulk mining methods, very similar to what you see at Goldex or Young-Davidson. These are big, highly productive stopes ranging from 70,000 to 90,000 tons. So they’re very, very productive. And the other notable areas, as I highlighted earlier, is increasing our Alamac area, which is a high tonnage to development ratio. These are big, bulky stopes as well, ranging from 60,000 to 80,000 tons in around the four, four and a half gram range.
What I wanted to highlight here in a slight disconnect from our internal models to where The Street is, is what we bought is in teal, okay? What we’ve done in the last six months is in red, and the pink is highlighting the growth areas that we are currently drilling. So you can see from a size and scalability perspective that this is a significant endowment of mineralization.
To focus now on our exploration program, like I said, 130,000 meters. It’s broken into three components. You have 30,000 meters of pure growth drilling. We’ve been very, very successful in our South Rim drilling, highlighting intercepts of 16 grams over 8 meters, almost 90 grams over 3 meters in that South Rim area. The South Rim area is very significant. It was one of the areas that we highlighted in our due diligence process. And why that’s significant is it represents mineralization that sits in the furthest southern stratigraphic sequence and opens up mineralization right across the ore body in the footwall that was never ever touched.
You might ask why it was never touched. You can see in the image on the bottom right on the C to C prime cross-section. Historically, what they were mining here is 30 to 50 meters wide, ranging between 15 and 20 grams. So when you have zones that sit in the footwall that are 10 meters wide at 5 grams, you’re just gonna leave them be, especially at a gold price of $350 an ounce. The next one is by far the biggest component, is our resource to reserve program, 70,000 meters, which will underpin the foundation for the updated technical report in 2027. And then a high-definition program that we will continue on that’ll consistently de-risk the next 24 months as we go through our ramp up to push everything into the measured category.
To take a step back, the thing it’s important to note is that Hemlo has been hotly debated on what is the genesis of this ore body, okay? And we recently had two experts in both fields, in the orogenic field and in the porphyry field. And by the timing relationships and cross-cutting relationships and the geochemistry, it was clear to us that this is an Archean porphyry deposit. It’s important for near mine exploration, but arguably more important on a regional scale. Porphyry deposits form in clusters. They’re not one-offs. To say that there’s a one-off 30 million ounce ore body in a Precambrian belt like this is extremely rare in geological context.
So when you look at the data, we flip into Baggs Lake, Page Lake, and lo and behold, Porphyry Lake. What you see is a calc-alkaline porphyry intrusion that is two and a half the size, the time of the Hemlo porphyry intrusion. It’s dated around 2693, the same age as the Hemlo mineralization. And when you’re a geologist and you’re looking for orogenic deposits and you see a gram at surface, you’re gonna let that be. But what we’re showing you here is 557 samples taken from surface at a gram. As a geologist, alarm bells should be ringing in your head saying, “Drill here.” This is a project that was consolidated prior to the sale of Barrick and is, quite frankly, getting us very much excited.
Just the key objectives and maybe also to take a step back. A year ago today, there was four people in this company, okay? In that time, we’ve been able to build out a tier one executive team, do our listing on the TSX Venture December 2nd, graduate to the TSX main board, complete two IBAs for the life of mine, which is extremely rare, update a mineral resource and add 34% to that right away, do our sector evaluation, and reprioritize the mining sequence. We got included into the GDXJ. We’re currently working through our trade-off studies for the open pit and underground that’ll feed into a new life of mine technical report.
We’ve done significant upgrades to the mill. We now know our milling capacity is well north of 10,000 ton per day. We run two grinding lines that can do 7,000 ton per day on each line, which is a huge, huge bonus for us. So I beg to differ that there’s a management team that has been this aggressive in owning an asset and building a company out within a year. And we significantly outperformed the GDXJ. So with that, I left us about five minutes for questions, so—
You did. Well done. Thanks, Jason. Do we have any questions for Jason? If not, I’m prepared and ready. Okay. Jason, first off, when we think about the mine, at current prices, is there any value or thought of returning to the open pit and maybe getting some complimentary feed from that?
Yeah. So the open pit trade-off study, the open pit works at $2,000 gold. What we do here at Hemlo is, unfortunately, you can’t maximize NPV and cash flow. We choose to maximize cash flow. The trade-off is really do you incur $300 million in capitalized stripping, or do you bulk this from underground? The thing you have to remember is that when you bulk it from underground, you’re gonna basically discard a million ounces. Given Carney’s new tax policy, that open pit project would be 100% tax deductible, and it impacts us the most because we don’t have any tax losses. So it’s a significant operation and can significantly grow our production profile well north of 250,000 ounces.
Yeah. And then maybe another one as a follow-up. In terms of that regional exploration upside, but also the upside for continuing to drill at depth. When we think for this year, what’s left of it and then to next year, can you give us an idea of the split of commitment in terms of meters, I guess, for regional versus at the mine?
Yeah. Our mine exploration is about $38 million, and our regional program is 1.2 million. Yeah. So significantly different. It’s really about this year, about ground truthing, mapping, sampling, and then ranking targets, and then next year, go out and drill to kill them.
Yeah. Or have a new discovery. Thank you, Jason. If there’s no further questions, please join me in thanking Jason for his presentation. Thank you. [audience applauding]
